When the Killing's Done (38 page)

At any rate, when finally she does leave the office, it’s past six and all traces of light have faded from the sky. The yachts sit patiently at their berths, muted amber lights showing in one cabin or another, the water as still as the boardwalk that parallels it. There’s a faint echoing thump, a noise so soft it’s been sealed and wrapped twice over by the time it reaches her, and she looks up to see a working boat—
uni
divers—gliding past the ranks of ghostly masts, lights slowly pulsing, in search of its berth. It’s a moment stolen out of the day, a moment of tranquillity and surcease, but she doesn’t linger. She’s always been a brisk walker, always in a hurry, and she’s moving quickly, ducking around children, exiled smokers, strolling couples. Just as she’s passing the Docksider, she becomes aware of the music drifting down from upstairs, a cover band sloppily working its way through one of the tunes from her mother’s day—and that’s when she pulls up so suddenly the jogger coming up behind her has to swerve wide right to avoid her, very nearly colliding with a pair of oncoming women in the process. She sees the women’s faces flood with alarm and annoyance beneath their flap-brimmed whale-watchers’ hats, there’s a murmured apology, a scramble of limbs—the jogger’s legs glowing as if they were fluorescent—and then he’s gone and one of the women calls out something, but she’s not listening. She’s rooted to the spot.

Her mother
. In the confusion of the day she’s forgotten all about her. Her mother’s baking a birthday cake. She expects to be taken out to dinner, as promised. At this very moment she’s no doubt sitting in the easy chair in the living room, with Ed, abusing vodka, the images of chaos on CNN drifting past like clouds in a flattened sky. Guiltily, Alma digs out her cell phone and dials her home number.

Her mother answers on the first ring.

“It’s me, Mom. I just wanted to say I had to work late and—”

“On your
birth
day?”

“Well, yeah. Some things came up.” She can hear the falseness in her voice, the amateur theatricality—and why does it always seem as if she’s hiding something when she’s speaking with her own mother? When, in fact, she’s not? Because many things
have
come up, one of them—Alicia’s duplicity—as disorienting and disturbing as anything she’s been through in a long while. Aside from the protestors, that is. And they tend to give it up when the sun sets. “But I’m leaving now—I’ll be home in half an hour, half an hour tops.”

“I’m cooking.”

“But I wanted to take you out, my treat—”

“I said to Ed, ‘Ed, she’s overworked, and I want to make it nice for her today of all days, no stress, know what I mean’—just like when you were a girl, and Ed agreed with me.” A pause. “If you really want to, we can go out to that restaurant tomorrow, but it’s
our
treat, definitely our treat.” And then she muffles the phone with one hand and calls out to Ed for confirmation. “Right, Ed?”

“But tomorrow’s the concert. Remember? Tim got me tickets?”

No response.

“You said you’d go with me because Tim’s out on the island?”

“Who was it again?”

“Micah Stroud? I told you, I think you’ll like him. He’s”—she’s about to say
Just like what you were listening to this morning, but not as soft-brained and poppy, because he sings with fire, real fire, and commitment
, but catches herself—“I don’t know. But you’ll like him. Trust me.”

“Okay, fine. But forget the restaurant. The lasagna’s already in the oven—meatless. Homemade. And both Ed and me are fine with a quiet night at home. Okay?”

She’s about to chirp “Okay” into the receiver because it’s been a long day and the idea of letting her mother baby her is beginning to enlarge for her, since what’s the point of having your mother installed in your guest bedroom if you can’t let yourself go? when she reaches the car and suddenly loses the ability to form a coherent sentence, to speak even. Because the car, parked in the shadows facing the artificial lagoon with its tethered boats and strolling tourists, has been defaced all over again. The fact of it, the discovery of it, after Alicia and Wilson Gutierrez and the muffled chants of the protestors that kept breaking through the pianissimo passages of the string quartets on the classical channel so that it became a kind of static in itself, is as much a shock as a sudden fender bender or the savage propulsive snarls of the dog at the window of the car beside hers. From the phone, clutched in the hand she’s dropped to her side, the thin complaint of her mother’s voice, lost to circumstance: “Alma, are you there? Alma?”

This time the color of the paint is red, or at least it shows red under the streaming yellowish illumination of the arc lights running along the promenade, and the message, though its import is the same, aims at a more general application. What it says, in the ballooning continuous letters of spray-can fluidity that loop up over the hood to obscure the view out of the windshield, is:
Pig Killer
. Only that. An epithet and accusation wrapped up in a single compound noun, which is, she has to admit, in her case at least, incontestable.

For a long moment, she stands there, feeling the sting of it. She
is
a killer, of pigs, of rats, of fennel and star thistle and of the introduced turkeys that will have to be removed in good time, a killer in the service of something higher, of restoration, redemption, salvation, but a killer all the same. Sadness, with its rotten edges, fills her—and weariness, weariness too, an exhaustion that saps her like the first withering assault of a winter cold—as she leans forward, and with the raised plastic wedge of her cell phone, begins to scrape the dark red paint from the glass.

The concert is at the Lobero, a restored downtown theater that ticks and groans with the decelerated rhythm of life three-quarters of a century ago, when the world was a bigger place with fewer people in it. Standing there with her mother on the Spanish tiles outside the tall wooden doors, Alma can’t help thinking about that, about a world in which the population was less than a third of what it is now, all these surplus people absent, blown away like pollen to the far ends of the earth to let the rivers recover, the forests, the animals. Nineteen twenty-four, that’s what the plaque out front says. She tries to picture it. Not the flappers and gangsters and all the rest, but people living close to the bone in the aftermath of war and the influenza it gestated and delivered, populations confined by geography and the limits of food production, jungles standing tall, mountaintops unconquered, the seas swarming with fish, mammals and invertebrates—that was the way it was when this theater was erected on the site of the old one, which dated back to 1873, when the world was bigger yet.

“You want another glass of wine?” her mother asks. She’s dressed for the occasion in a powder-blue pantsuit and she’s done her eyes and appropriated a pair of dangling earrings from the jewelry box in the bedroom. She’s wearing heels and she’s teased out her hair and sprayed it in place. She looks nice. And she’s radiant in her pleasure over the evening out. Which is nice too.

“No, I don’t think so,” Alma says, shaking her head for emphasis. They each had a glass at home, to get in the mood, and a second glass—or plastic cup, which is what the wine is served in at the booth outside the theater—when they arrived. Alma likes to be on time, likes to be ahead of time in a way she’ll be the first to admit is just a shade neurotic—she’s not comfortable at the airport unless she’s sitting at the gate with a newspaper before the display announcing her flight even appears on the monitor above the check-in desk—and she and her mother are first in line. Which is not to say that she isn’t ready to unwind, enjoying the faint out-of-body sensation the second glass gives her while the cool of the night breathes around her, and more than happy to chat with the people behind them, two college girls who’ve come up from L.A. on the train because they’re rabid Micah Stroud fans, but she’s thinking ahead to the concert itself and the pressure on her bladder five or six songs in. So, no—no more wine now. “Maybe later,” she says, even as her mother, with a restrained smile, ducks away to get a refill, mouthing (redundantly: the seats are reserved), “Save a seat for me.”

At quarter of eight, the ushers push open the doors and she takes her mother’s arm to guide her across the carpeted foyer. There’s a small contretemps about the wine—one of the ushers gliding up to inform them that no drinks are allowed inside even as her mother drains the cup and hands it over—and then they’re in the auditorium itself, her mother giving a little chirp of surprise over how elegant the theater is, as if she’d expected some barren rave hall or bottle-strewn dive. They stand there in back a moment, silently gazing out on the graduated rows of plush burgundy seats and the darkened stage beyond, before her mother excuses herself and heads off in the direction of the ladies’ room. Alma finds her way to their seats on her own—decent seats, fifteen rows back, center section—and settles in to study the program in the pre-concert hush.

She feels herself relaxing, relishing the moment. The lights glow softly from the wall sconces, people’s voices thrum with anticipation. She’s seen Micah Stroud six times now, twice in San Francisco, three times in L.A. and once in Phoenix. This will be the first time for the girls who were behind her in line, and she envies them that, the rush of experience, the way the lights dim even as the hovering forms of the band members begin to take shape and drift through the shadows and then the spot comes up full on the naked mike and the drummer skims the hi-hat with his brushes and suddenly Micah’s there, his voice floating up and over the anchor of his guitar till it insinuates itself into every last crevice of the house and all the people in it. That’s how it’s been every time. And now, expectantly, she leans forward, studying the stage. Taps one foot idly. Resists worrying about her mother.

Soon, the empty spaces around her have begun to fill, the lights quaver and she’s just turning to look over her shoulder for her mother when here she is, clutching her purse in one hand and a rumpled program in the other. “There was a line at the ladies’,” she murmurs by way of extenuation, then settles into her seat. The audience quiets. A few latecomers shuffle up and down the aisles, squeeze in over laps, purses, rearranged knees. The man in front of them lets out a nervous ratcheting cough. And then there’s an accelerating clatter of applause—apes beating their tight-skinned palms and hard-knuckled phalanges together, she’s thinking, no different from the way it was on the savannas of Africa three million years ago, and she’s one of them, clap-clap-clapping in affirmation—as the emcee struts briskly across the stage to take hold of the microphone and give the audience a long bemused look till the clapping trails off.

He’s a diminutive flesh-challenged man in his forties with limp hair hanging in his eyes and obscuring his ears, and he seizes the moment to deliver an abbreviated pep talk about the series that brings such nationally—and
internationally
—recognized acts as Micah Stroud (applause all over again) to this historic theater in our own little burg of Santa Barbara on a bi-monthly basis and how everyone should feel free to take a brochure and subscribe, because you’ll not only be supporting the music you love but getting a real bargain too, and did you realize that series subscriptions can save you up to a hundred and twenty dollars per season? He knows to keep it short, but still there are catcalls from down in front, and someone behind Alma begins chanting
Micah, Micah, Micah
till the crowd picks it up and the man at the mike goes silent. For a long moment he merely stands there giving them an impish look before raising both hands, palms up, until the chant dies down.

“And now,” he cries out in a new voice altogether—stentorian, fruity, the voice of the shill, the barker, the advance man—“the moment you’ve all been waiting for . . . ladies and gentlemen, gnomes and little fishes, I bring you the Cajun Wonder, the Lion of the Bayou, the man with the biggest voice and biggest heart in the business . . . MICAH . . . STROUD!”

Though she’s the sort of person who’s hyper-vigilant, always aware of her surroundings and open in all five senses to what the world brings her, she doesn’t stir or look around her or do anything but tap her foot and nod her head in acknowledgment of the beat till he’s three songs into his set, solo, acoustic, the band waiting in the wings because for now, in a reversal of the usual pattern, it’s just his voice and guitar. Her mother is there beside her, but Alma’s not aware of her, the songs that have become so personal they might have been written for her alone sweeping her up and out of herself to some other place altogether. Which is as it should be. Which is why she’s come. Which is why her focus is exclusively on Micah, bent over his guitar till the tight glistening construct of his pompadour breaks loose and the patch of his soul beard shines with sweat.

He opens with “Loggerhead Blues,” a slow, walking blues that segues into the syncopated upbeat swing of “Dip and Rise,” before bringing it back down to the tragic release of “Minamata,” with its images of deformed infants drawn back into the amniotic sea whence they came till the methyl mercury vanishes from the environment, from their mother’s eggs and their father’s sperm, and they can emerge again, whole and clean and waving their tiny unclenched fingers and toes in a salutation of pure joy. She sways in her seat. She’s not thinking, just feeling, because here’s a man who understands, who fights for the environment, who if he only knew would rise up in all his power and influence to back her and Tim and everything they’re trying to accomplish.

And then she
is
thinking, even as the band slips out of the wings to join him onstage and he ducks under the strap of his electric guitar and the drummer counts off the beat with his two shining sticks, wondering if he’s ever visited the islands, if he knows the gravity of the situation and what’s at stake. She glances at her mother, who’s enjoying herself, or seems to be. Then she’s focused again on the stage, the opening chords of “Swamp Savior” coming down like an atmospheric phenomenon, but she’s not in the auditorium any longer—no, she’s out on the island, Micah Stroud at her side, assessing the pig damage, bending low to gaze in at the captive foxes in the tranquillity and safety of their cages, asking him if he wouldn’t maybe write a song for them, an anthem to salvation, and he’s leaning in close, hovering over her with the sun caught in his eyes and drawling,
Of course, and I’ll go one better and donate the whole proceeds to the cause. How’s that? Good enough for you? No? Well, I’m going to write a check too . . . but only if there’s a quid pro quo here, because did anybody ever tell you how irresistible you are? Hey, you ever take time off? I mean, would you want to go on the European leg of the tour with me? Stockholm? You ever been to Stockholm . . .?